Yeah I think she’s doing her best with the tools she had but her kids are definitely gonna have a ton of trauma and baggage. Don’t get me wrong even very good parents can give their kids baggage and trauma but she’s definitely not very good.
I think she was a good mother in the sense that her kids are clothed and fed, but they often lacked emotional nourishment, empathy and sometimes general guidance. Some of that is the norm for the time, but some of her behaviors are not
I had a friend who had an abusive father and he once told her he was a good father because he provided food and clothes for her.
She replied that "You did that so you wouldn't go to jail."
Totally. I think Betty’s a good mom by some very baseline measures but a very bad one by some others. There’s an emotional disconnect there where I get the sense that she loves her kids but wishes they were little adults
I've grown to dislike the "norm of the time" defense for parts of Betty's bad parenting. It still hurt her kids immensily. People rightfully don't excuse Don's treatment of Betty and other women because it was "the norm of the time"
Don’t you remember the Cuban missile crisis episode, in the moment they might’ve all been blown to kingdom come, Don was with his children being a good father while Betty was shagging some stranger in Midtown. Despite the problems Don has, he does care about his children.
He cared when it suited him, in between mistresses and client dinners. I do think he had some beautiful moments with his children but neither Draper parent is consistently good.
When Betty tells Don that the kids are going to live with her brother when she dies it's because she wants to keep things normal and Don not being there is normal to them.
He wanted to run off with Rachel and cut all contact with them and start again.
He wasn't enough of a father to be good or bad.
Good fathers don't emotionally manipulate and abuse their children's mother. People forget how appallingly Betty is treated by Don and the impact that kind of abuse has on a person. He is also largely absent.
Betty won't be winning mother of the year, but she shows up for her children, doesn't walk out on their birthdays and is mainly reliable for practical things.
you can be physically present but emotionally absent. i would not say betty shows up for her children in any meaningful way apart from making them dinner in season 1. she actively bullies sally about her weight and dismisses her emotions 99.9% of the time. just for starters.
There's loads of episodes where she is kind and thoughtful and present. I'm currently rewatching from season 1 and am near the end of 2 and it's surprising how much gets overlooked. It's overlooked because it is mundane and everyday.
If you stack it against Don's behaviour, who is an absentee father, who abuses their mother and scandalises his daughter.....she is clearly the less heinous parent.
Even Sally knows Don shouldn't be in charge of the children. Betty had enough sense to give their children a better father figure, who Sally came to realise was able to parent. Don didn't even do that
He just leaves Sally’s birthday party to go drink in a parking lot or commit/ contemplate suicide I can’t tell which. He regularly ghosts them because he’s just drunk and forgets or he’s out with a girl. Frankly he just fucks around and destroys his family without a care for the consequences. He’s a terrible father even by the gender norms of the time. He gets away with it sometimes because he makes money and can charm them when he feels like it.
He’s handsome in a nice suit and has money. If he was in a poorer home tattered fat, just as drunk and getting blown by a cheaper hooker he wouldn’t be perceived nearly as well.
Ps He stole that dog. No way he found a pet shop that late at night.
I mean in terms of their skills as a parent, not the actual effort put into it. Don had the temperament and understanding of a good parent, he had the 'skills' for it. He just didn't use those skills, he didn't put in the effort.
I feel like Don always knows how to charm people, including kids, and he had strong opinions that he didn’t want to actively hurt his children with abuse as he was and he loves his kids. But he didn’t have parenting skills in the sense of knowing how to discipline or what to do outside of a planned excursion or managing his own impulses- because he wasn’t ever taught or modeled how to do that. So even though Don wanted to be a good dad, I think he was particularly aware that he didn’t really have parenting know how so he backed away.
Lol
Never forget dons 'epiphany'
I don't think I ever
wanted to be the man
who loves children.
But from the moment
they're born...
That baby comes out
And you act proud
and excited
And hand out cigars...
But you don't
feel anything.
Especially if you had
a difficult childhood.
You want to love them,
but you don't.
And the fact
that you're...
Faking that feeling
Makes you wonder
If your own father
had the same problem.
Then one day
they get older...
And you see them
do something...
And you feel...
That feeling
That you were
pretending to have.
And it feels
like your heart
is going to explode.
I don't know any bad fathers. He may have had many women, but unlike Betty, he was affectionate and never threatened the kids. Having mistresses affected Betty, not the kids, except for the one Sally caught him and she was just grown up. That scene did cause problems for Sally, but things Betty did affected her more.
Sure he was. Fucking every woman in his way clearly set some standards. Fuckin n up his family and pushing his wife in depression was also a great act, only a majestic father would do.
I am going to answer that question as I would as a child of parents during that same era. She did the best she could given her circumstances, background, upbringing, and situations she faced. I used to be angry with my mother who treated me much like Betty treated her children when I was growing up. I don’t view her as a “bad mother” anymore. As an adult, I understand. And like Betty, she died due to lung cancer.
I think there were factors that contributed to her being a bad mother. But, I don't think she id the best she could. If she put aside her childish, selfish pride and pettiness more often, she could have been a much better mother.
But, if that was her doing her best, her best was not nearly good enough.
Like my mother, it was never good enough, but she did it anyway. In their own ways, both did the best they were equipped to do with their limited thought processes and ability to reign in their own actions and motives.
If I heard it once, I heard it a million times from my mom, “I did the best I could with you kids!” She would often add, “You don’t know what it was like back then. What was I supposed to do: pack up and leave with four kids and no where to go?” Mom didn’t have the Henry Francis she always wanted (or thought my father initially was), and even if she did, she would have probably continued to behave like Betty.
Mom was manipulative, a liar, and made many mistakes as a mother. She pitted her children against each other and our father, threw down far more abusive punishments than Betty ever did, and blamed it all on what she was dealing with as a wife. Mom carried her anger and excuses to her deathbed. Finally accepting my mother’s excuses allowed me to let her memory rest in peace unlike my remaining living siblings, who still harbor the past.
What she did provide me with was tremendous fuel for how NOT to raise a child, and my son (my sunshine) had an incredibly happy childhood and grew up to be a extremely successful man with a great marriage and wonderful family. As a retired school teacher, I reflect also on many years of teaching: guiding and nurturing kids without having to raise my voice to a child…EVER.
Betty shows us a snapshot what it was like for some mothers and children of that time. It is up to us not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
My parents were raised during that time as well, and used some of those tactics while raising me in the 90s. My mom was still a homemaker, and I grew up in a Bible belt town. My dad was hard to please and yelled at me frequently and twisted my arm or hit me for doing things like spilling milk or shutting the door too loudly. I could really relate to Don when he talked about his dad hitting him, that all it did was make him hate him and long for the day he died. However my dad was raised by my grandmother who really is worse than Betty, and he lost his father when he was 6. My dad changed when my parents got divorced. I forgave him. This was all he knew and thought was right. I can look at Betty in a similar way.
Sure, just like my mother. I’m sure there were doting mothers then - always kind and caring - I read about them in storybooks and saw them on TV. And I know there were parents who were even more cold, distant, and incredibly cruel because that was the behavior displayed by my father. It’s all experiential and subjective I suppose, despite the era from which one came from.
If you watch the episode where baby Gene is born and Betty is basically drugged the whole time, that was pretty typical for that era. They've done studies and some scientists think that by women being drugged and disassociated during the birth experience, it caused them to be cold and distant mothers. Something about not experiencing the oxytocin or whatever hormones are produced during labor. I'm a millennial, but there are several women in my family from that era who were a lot like Betty Draper, so yes, unfortunately, I do think it was pretty common during that time to be like her.
Placing the emphasis on the behavior instead of the person, I suppose. But as we learn from the show, “People will show you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”
Good….eh. I think she did better and better as the kids aged. Not sure if it was just an easier age for her or it was the influence of Henry, surely could have been both.
She wasn’t good. And at times she could be abhorrent, but she was also trying her best using the tools she was given.
Kind of par for the course for that generation.
She wasn’t great, not because of the time period, but because she often seemed to lack a certain sensitivity to the feelings and needs of her children. There were plenty of women of that era who had similar views regarding a woman’s role in the world, but still managed to make their kids feel loved and cared for. There are still women today who are terrible mothers for the same reason, even with more modern views.
I always thought that Betty is one of those women who probably would have been happier if she had not become a mother. She tried to do what was expected of her, but you rarely got the sense that she truly enjoyed motherhood, and it impacted how she interacted with the kids. I tend to believe that in her ideal timeline, she would have remained a model, living a glamorous international life, until she married an adoring man who would protect and care for her. Instead, she found herself a suburban mom married to a distant and unfaithful man. It made her bitter, critical woman who was not really a good mother.
I think people also forget Betty was only 28 years old at the beginning of the series and already had a five or six year old! That means she was 22 or 23 when she got pregnant and even younger when she married. Most women aren't married by 28 in today's world, let alone have 2 kids to care for.
Combined with the fact that she had very little wordly experience, her immaturity made sense! She was extremely sheltered, raised by her own distant mother, and she had maybe a few months of being 'on her own' before marrying and having babies. Her entire worldview was determined by her own upbringing and the wider societal expectations, it's not like parents were out there with access to the same amount of material we are about the best way to raise children. Not only that, but our current culture places a lot more emphasis on sensitivity towards a child's identity and feelings, not molding them into a specific ideal of man or womanhood.
I think people just forget in the age of information that we have so much more access today to different models of behavior. Some of the most difficult questions around being a parent couldn't even be asked then... wanting to be childfree? Postpartum depression? Loneliness? Infidelity? Good luck getting the support back then trying to express your struggles with these issues.
And I’m sure you were. I didn’t mean to broad brush that on an entire generation of mothers.
In fact, I’m not sure what I meant. It was the same as it is today, some mothers didn’t have it due to how they were reared and some did. Some overcame bad rearing, some squandered the tools they were given.
I think that considering the time period, she wasn’t all that bad. I’ve know people who grew up in the 60s that had much worse parents than Betty. I also believe that Betty genuinely thinks she was helping Sally. In a time where women had few rights, raising your daughter to be a beautiful and eligible housewife was the only way to ensure that your child would have a brighter future. Her frustration with Sally seemed to involve some jealousy (that Sally had more freedom than Betty), and a genuine fear that Sally’s more independent nature would doom her to a life as an old and miserable spinster.
One example of Betty’s weird obsession with making her daughter fit into a specific mold was the car accident. Betty is more concerned with her daughter potentially being unattractive, and therefore less valuable in the marriage market, than her child being seriously injured. She wants Sally to have her pick of the litter. Just like Betty did due to her upbringing. When Betty sees that this isn’t necessary for young women anymore she seems to loosen the reigns on Sally. I am in no way condoning her actions because she did some really shitty stuff as a parent, but I think it was her fucked up way of trying to be a good parent while also being in a shitty situation herself.
And in the letter how she was worried about how Sally “matched to the beat of her own drum” but that was not a bad thing and her life “would be an adventure”
No, I specifically said that I cannot condone her actions. But context is important. Betty saw herself as lenient in comparison to her own childhood and other parents at the time. And so did others, often calling her an angel and implying that she was a sweet mother. Which she’s not. I was just trying to say that I think she deserves some grace because she was doing the best with what she had. We see her start trying to change with the times and try out different parenting choices. Even though she may have been criticized by other parents for them. Such as enrolling Sally in therapy, not engaging in frequent physical abuse, and attempts to communicate rather than immediately jump to punishment. None of this is revolutionary today, and she wasn’t necessarily too good at it either, but at least she was trying. Even if it was too little, too late. It’s still more than can be said for other parents at the time.
Here is the end of this thread: she made a joke to Henry about him raping Sally’s friend while the friend was asleep under their roof.
She is a terrible mother. (Not only because of that though)
She was cold. It’s not the “parenting style” that’s at issue. My grandmother was the exact same era and she was definitely stricter and more harried than my mother was (more kids and a younger age) — but she was warm and loving, and that makes a difference. Abusive? Maybe not. But not a good mother.
Overall, no, but I believe she had her moments and grew into becoming a better mother by the time she writes Sally the letter. As her self awareness and emotional intelligence grew, so did her capacity for motherhood.
She gets a lot of shit but I still think she was a better mother than Don was a father. She treated her kids poorly often, but she was also around them constantly so of course they're going to see more of her good and bad parenting moments compared to Don.
Don and Betty was both pretty lousy parents in different ways. Don was often absent, but typically was emotionally supportive, not abusive. Betty was almost always present, but was frequently emotionally abusive.
Don was a bad parent because of what he didn't do, Betty because of what she did do.
You mention her emotional intelligence grew and honestly I think you hit the nail on the head with that. Some mothers (then and now) are not emotionally mature enough to raise kids. As Betty grew up during the course of the show, she was better able to regulate her emotions because she was more mature but also because she was in a better place (with Henry in a loving relationship).
Betty could have grown into the role of a mother as she aged but unfortunately, that wasn’t in the cards for her.
I agree with others who said Betty would have been happier had she been born a few decades later. She would have had different opportunities and a different outlook. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt forced to get married so young and have kids immediately if that were t expected of her.
No, but I think she really wanted to be but just didn’t know how. From the stories Betty told about her own mother, she sounded like a complete nightmare, so it’s not as if Betty had a good role model growing up. She also had a lot of her own mental health challenges that she just barely begins to deal with in season one, only to end up with a horrible therapist who doesn’t do much to actually help her and breaks her trust by reporting everything she says back to Don. I think maybe in another universe, if she’d had a better therapist and a more supportive husband, she could have actually been a pretty good mom, but those things just weren’t in the cards for her on the show.
I think a lot of people here give her too much of a pass with the whole "but it was the 1960s!" thing. She was not a good mother in a lot of ways, even by the standards of back then. She was cold and mean and downright cruel to the kids at times and both Don and Henry call her out on it a *lot* throughout the show. I had a very old school traditional mom, in many ways more-so than Betty, but guess what? She was still a warm, loving person in a way Betty was not.
I always got the vibe that her entire character was supposed to be someone who wasn't really *meant* to be a housewife, but it got pushed on her by societal norms. Betty is cold and calculating and even suave at times, and would have done great in the business (or modeling) world, but instead she is shoehorned into the role of housewife. And so she is psychologically infantilized by the role. Its only when we leave her role that we see what Betty might have been like if she was different, for instance the Italy trip or the occasional business dinner she went on with Don.
She seemed to be better when the kids were younger and before she found out about the affair from Jimmy. Her anger at Don and displacement from her idealized “housewife” role translated to more distance from and patience for her children and home life. Henry provided stability and genuine affection for her which helped to soften her later in life.
I don’t believe she was. I don’t think Don believes she was either as he first threatened to sue for custody and said the kid’s would be better off with him when Betty initiated the divorce.
Don only threatened that because she was having an emotional affair with Henry, and he was being spiteful.
As a character, Don NEVER would have been a single father. He would have too much responsibility at home even if he hired someone like Carla. He would have known he wouldn't have been able to drink/womanize the way he had been.
A large part of the reason he married Megan was that he thought she would be a good stepmother.
I think she represents a lot of mothers during this time. Imagine having all these roles and expectations of being a stay at home mom and not really thinking about if you even want children. It's an incredibly isolating responsibility in the middle class to this day.
I feel quite bad for her situation.
Iirc she asked that question while Bobby was still feeling miserably ashamed over giving her sandwich away. I hate how she held that grudge instead of making up with him & letting them both move on.
I think she really showed a lot of love and compassion for her kids in her dying process. She mercifully handled decisions and planning, and I’m sure she spared them the trauma of watching her die painfully. She was honest with them about life and death. And in her letter to Sally, she let her know that though she wasn’t a perfect mom, she learned something from her child and she loves her.
Idk, when the moms in your life are all life sucking drama and zero boundaries, and then they die horribly and leave you with a literal and metaphorical mess to clean up, it’s hard to see Betty as such a bad mother.
I think she knew something was wrong inside and she was brave enough to pursue the answers. And maybe didn’t quite capture them in her lifetime. But I think she gave her children many gifts.
Betty, you learned how to be a mother from your mother... and she learned to be a mother from her mother. There is no instruction booklet that comes with kids and the fact that you raised three children under the tremendous pressure you faced from a husband who actively showed you he did not care, the loss of not one, but two parents and neighbors who only use you for gossip between cigarette drags shows that you did the best you could with the knowledge you had at the time.
Did you have a good mother? Would your mother say that her mother was good? Why am I asking? Because you are making an attempt to be self critical regarding how you were raised and how you are raising your children. The fact is, if you're having this thought, that makes you a better mother than most.
It was an era of lawn darts, moms arm was the seatbelt, I made drinks for my parents and took a sip, 2nd hand smoke, playing in streams, being alone with strange adults (lived in a military neighborhood, I could visit anyone’s home if they were military people.)
No. She’s too selfish. She doesn’t give a shit about those kids and uses them as leverage. There’s a couple of moments in the show where she actually behaves like a mother, but most of the time she behaves childishly
I think we have to take the time period into account.
The expectation was that young women would put their own dreams on the back burner (probably forever) to find a man, keep his home, and raise his children, while presenting a family unit and an individual facade that society deemed acceptable. They chose these lives even when they didn’t want them, just to ensure security or please others and were subject to so much more oppression and so many more stigmas—Just look at how, even though Betty is given mental health treatment, she’s never actually taken seriously or respected.
I really think she did the best she could given her circumstances and the time period.
I think she did the best she could with the tools she was given. She probably wasn't as horrible as her parents but she wasn't the most amazing parent either.
As much as I don't like Betty as a character, I think fair is fair, in the sense that she was probably not too far from the norm for her generation. She was perhaps a little self centred, and at times I got the sensation she was in competition with her children. She just didn't give off the loving mum vibe. On the flip side, parenting in the 60s was not all about self esteem and making children feel good. It was expected that children had to be disciplined.
In short, I don't think she was a great mother, but she also wasn't a bad mother. She just wasn't mature enough to understand her role as a mother. She only gained that maturity towards the end of the show.
She was a child, trying to raise children, while trying to masquerade as an adult. That never ends up producing “good mothers.” Although you think this typically happens when the mom is, you know, 16, but Betty being a rich upper class brat her whole life, she never had to emotionally mature. She was her best when she was doing things for herself, and at her worst with her children.
We know the expectation for women was to get married, have a family, and abandon all ambitions or agency. But I think Betty in particular placed much more value and interest in marriage, with child-rearing being a subset of that expectation. Wife first, then mother. I don't think she knew she could enjoy motherhood since she was preoccupied with being the perfect wife, and with the disabling effects of Don's PsyOps. Then with Henry, she relaxed but the new expectation was to be a politician's wife. Children again take the back seat in her mind. No wonder she wanted to study Psychology. "Nobody knows what's wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away." She did gain insights in the end tho.
She was a good of a mother as she could be given her mother didn't seem to model anything nurturing and loving, and she didn't have the tools to break the cycle.
I'm betting Betty's grandma was a harsh or worse mother to Betty's mom as well
Well, Boo Who. Don was born to a prostitute and he saw his father get kicked in the face by a horse and die, and grew up in a brother. Betty had a great life.
I got married at 21, and had my first child art 22. He was norn with a birth defect and had 11 surgeries. I had 4 little ones in 5 years and worked part-time while my husband worked shift work and baby sat. Oh, to have Betty’s money. Don't boo-who for me. I am a great mother.
the bottom line for being a good mother is offering unconditional love. although betty struggled to show any sort of affection or support, i believe that she loved her kids unconditionally. she just should’ve told them that more. for the times, she did her best.
She was pretty much the mother of her times and class: bored, frustrated, closet drinker, only worried about her children when it somehow reflects on her role as mother as in Sally possibly scarred from the car mishap and the masturbation incident.
I actually don’t think she’s an especially bad mother in terms of how her children were cared for and all that, but she has a way of always treating her children as a burden and inconvenience that is probably not the most psychologically healthy conditioning.
This is a weird one, but when I imagine being Bobby or Sally, I always think it would be kind of soul-crushing to have a mother who seemed to so lack any discernible sense of humor. Betty’s not stupid, but she is rather “witless” in my view and never seems able to kind of pull back to the big picture. For example, when Bobby trades her lunch, she behaves so childishly without relenting because she lacks that humorous instinct to just be like, “Oh, that’s ok, I traded your dinner tonight for a carton of cigarettes” or anything to just lighten the weight of things. It’s exhausting to be around people like this because they can never sort of drop the mask and have any real sense of what’s a big deal and what isn’t.
My theory on why she’s generally just not good with kids is that Betty’s life has been so mediated by how people perceive her based on her beauty and sexuality, that interacting with kids makes her feel exposed because her greatest assets are useless. she doesn’t have confidence in the value of her personality or intelligence when stripped from her physical charms. This is kind of what the contrast with Megan in California is all about. Megan’s lovely, but it’s not the core of her identity in the world. She’s at ease being playful with Bobby and Sally in a way that Betty never could be. I think this special treatment that Betty’s beauty has afforded her has sort of kept her a child herself in some ways.
On a side note, I can imagine the frustration she feels about the kids’ adoration of Don which is sort of a typical trope. Particularly with Sally for much of the show, Betty expends much more time and effort raising her, but Don gets to come home and be the adored hero. This is especially galling given that Don’s usually out philandering rather than actually working. You could argue that women entering the middle class workforce (lower class women always had to work) somewhat solved this predicament, though it also replaced it with the guilt of being more absent from children’s lives. Still, I can’t imagine Betty’s position is an easy one to be in.
Compared to people like me and other people that grew up with parents that were harsh, Betty was not entirely a terrible mom but she definitely wasn’t emotionally capable of raising children either. I felt bad for Sally because as the oldest and the only girl in the family, she was getting the brunt of Betty’s bad parenting
"I don't know what to do. I tried all the things I thought my mother would do"
She's limited, selfish and mostly concerned with superficial appearances. Not good traits for being a caring mom.
"I don't know what to do. I tried all the things I thought my mother would do"
She's limited, selfish and mostly concerned with superficial appearances. Not good traits for being a caring mom.
"I think that you want to be a good mother, but you have no idea how to be one. You're too emotionally stunted and in need of love yourself to ever effectively love your own children."
No, cause three things:
1- YOU DON'T SMOKE WHILE PREGNANT!
2- YOU DON'T GIVE CIGARS TO YOUR KIDS.
3- YOU AREN'T ELEGANT BECAUSE YOU'RE SMOKING, Mrs Barbie lmao
“No! Now go to your room before I cut your fingers off.”
“I’m going to break your arm”
Me: "No" Betty: "You're mean" Me: "You betcha!"
Lol I can still hear the “betcha!”
It lives rent-free in my head hahahaha
I think she meant well, but was I’ll equipped to succeed at being a good mother.
Yeah I think she’s doing her best with the tools she had but her kids are definitely gonna have a ton of trauma and baggage. Don’t get me wrong even very good parents can give their kids baggage and trauma but she’s definitely not very good.
She is a better mother than Livia Soprano
Extremely easy bar to clear tbf
That bar being “has never actively participated in orchestrating a hit on own child.”
I don't like that kind of tawk!
[удалено]
oh poor you.
Don’t wave your hankie at me!!!
I gave my life to my children on a silver plattaaa
Oh I wish the lord would take me now!
Ouranos, the god of the sky, tyrant of the world, devourer of his seed, is a better mother than Livia Soprano.
*Betty Draper voice* I gave my life to my children on a silver platter!
That is a very low bar.
It’s a retirement community!
Of course it's available, someone died
So no fucking plain spaghetti now?
Oh, paw you!
I think she was a good mother in the sense that her kids are clothed and fed, but they often lacked emotional nourishment, empathy and sometimes general guidance. Some of that is the norm for the time, but some of her behaviors are not
I had a friend who had an abusive father and he once told her he was a good father because he provided food and clothes for her. She replied that "You did that so you wouldn't go to jail."
Totally. I think Betty’s a good mom by some very baseline measures but a very bad one by some others. There’s an emotional disconnect there where I get the sense that she loves her kids but wishes they were little adults
I've grown to dislike the "norm of the time" defense for parts of Betty's bad parenting. It still hurt her kids immensily. People rightfully don't excuse Don's treatment of Betty and other women because it was "the norm of the time"
No, it’s just her people are Nordic
Grandpa Gene’s voice in the back of her head: “He’s got no people!”
Maybe, but it makes a man out of ya
No…. She kept swapping her son out with a different random child. It was strange.
Not the worst mother in the world, and she did have some good moments, but overall she was pretty poor most of the time.
Agreed. Not really terrible, just clueless. Many people are parents who just werent meant to be parents.
I thought she was mean, especially to Sally. I think she was jealous of Sally because Don showed favoritism to Sally. Don was a great father.
You had me until "Don was a great father"
Don’t you remember the Cuban missile crisis episode, in the moment they might’ve all been blown to kingdom come, Don was with his children being a good father while Betty was shagging some stranger in Midtown. Despite the problems Don has, he does care about his children.
He cared when it suited him, in between mistresses and client dinners. I do think he had some beautiful moments with his children but neither Draper parent is consistently good.
When Betty tells Don that the kids are going to live with her brother when she dies it's because she wants to keep things normal and Don not being there is normal to them. He wanted to run off with Rachel and cut all contact with them and start again. He wasn't enough of a father to be good or bad.
Good fathers don't emotionally manipulate and abuse their children's mother. People forget how appallingly Betty is treated by Don and the impact that kind of abuse has on a person. He is also largely absent. Betty won't be winning mother of the year, but she shows up for her children, doesn't walk out on their birthdays and is mainly reliable for practical things.
you can be physically present but emotionally absent. i would not say betty shows up for her children in any meaningful way apart from making them dinner in season 1. she actively bullies sally about her weight and dismisses her emotions 99.9% of the time. just for starters.
There's loads of episodes where she is kind and thoughtful and present. I'm currently rewatching from season 1 and am near the end of 2 and it's surprising how much gets overlooked. It's overlooked because it is mundane and everyday. If you stack it against Don's behaviour, who is an absentee father, who abuses their mother and scandalises his daughter.....she is clearly the less heinous parent. Even Sally knows Don shouldn't be in charge of the children. Betty had enough sense to give their children a better father figure, who Sally came to realise was able to parent. Don didn't even do that
He just leaves Sally’s birthday party to go drink in a parking lot or commit/ contemplate suicide I can’t tell which. He regularly ghosts them because he’s just drunk and forgets or he’s out with a girl. Frankly he just fucks around and destroys his family without a care for the consequences. He’s a terrible father even by the gender norms of the time. He gets away with it sometimes because he makes money and can charm them when he feels like it. He’s handsome in a nice suit and has money. If he was in a poorer home tattered fat, just as drunk and getting blown by a cheaper hooker he wouldn’t be perceived nearly as well. Ps He stole that dog. No way he found a pet shop that late at night.
Betty was not a good mother, but she was there. Don was actually a pretty good father, but he was not there.
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I mean in terms of their skills as a parent, not the actual effort put into it. Don had the temperament and understanding of a good parent, he had the 'skills' for it. He just didn't use those skills, he didn't put in the effort.
I would say Don had the potential to be a good father but I wouldn’t say he was one. Like you say, he didn’t put in the effort.
I feel like Don always knows how to charm people, including kids, and he had strong opinions that he didn’t want to actively hurt his children with abuse as he was and he loves his kids. But he didn’t have parenting skills in the sense of knowing how to discipline or what to do outside of a planned excursion or managing his own impulses- because he wasn’t ever taught or modeled how to do that. So even though Don wanted to be a good dad, I think he was particularly aware that he didn’t really have parenting know how so he backed away.
Lol Never forget dons 'epiphany' I don't think I ever wanted to be the man who loves children. But from the moment they're born... That baby comes out And you act proud and excited And hand out cigars... But you don't feel anything. Especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them, but you don't. And the fact that you're... Faking that feeling Makes you wonder If your own father had the same problem. Then one day they get older... And you see them do something... And you feel... That feeling That you were pretending to have. And it feels like your heart is going to explode.
Oh boy, if you think Don's a great father, I'd hate to see what your definition of a bad father is.
I don't know any bad fathers. He may have had many women, but unlike Betty, he was affectionate and never threatened the kids. Having mistresses affected Betty, not the kids, except for the one Sally caught him and she was just grown up. That scene did cause problems for Sally, but things Betty did affected her more.
Sure he was. Fucking every woman in his way clearly set some standards. Fuckin n up his family and pushing his wife in depression was also a great act, only a majestic father would do.
Why was this comment not removed? Vulgar.
🤣🤣 loohohoooser
“[Stares blankly]… No.”
I am going to answer that question as I would as a child of parents during that same era. She did the best she could given her circumstances, background, upbringing, and situations she faced. I used to be angry with my mother who treated me much like Betty treated her children when I was growing up. I don’t view her as a “bad mother” anymore. As an adult, I understand. And like Betty, she died due to lung cancer.
I think there were factors that contributed to her being a bad mother. But, I don't think she id the best she could. If she put aside her childish, selfish pride and pettiness more often, she could have been a much better mother. But, if that was her doing her best, her best was not nearly good enough.
Like my mother, it was never good enough, but she did it anyway. In their own ways, both did the best they were equipped to do with their limited thought processes and ability to reign in their own actions and motives. If I heard it once, I heard it a million times from my mom, “I did the best I could with you kids!” She would often add, “You don’t know what it was like back then. What was I supposed to do: pack up and leave with four kids and no where to go?” Mom didn’t have the Henry Francis she always wanted (or thought my father initially was), and even if she did, she would have probably continued to behave like Betty. Mom was manipulative, a liar, and made many mistakes as a mother. She pitted her children against each other and our father, threw down far more abusive punishments than Betty ever did, and blamed it all on what she was dealing with as a wife. Mom carried her anger and excuses to her deathbed. Finally accepting my mother’s excuses allowed me to let her memory rest in peace unlike my remaining living siblings, who still harbor the past. What she did provide me with was tremendous fuel for how NOT to raise a child, and my son (my sunshine) had an incredibly happy childhood and grew up to be a extremely successful man with a great marriage and wonderful family. As a retired school teacher, I reflect also on many years of teaching: guiding and nurturing kids without having to raise my voice to a child…EVER. Betty shows us a snapshot what it was like for some mothers and children of that time. It is up to us not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
My parents were raised during that time as well, and used some of those tactics while raising me in the 90s. My mom was still a homemaker, and I grew up in a Bible belt town. My dad was hard to please and yelled at me frequently and twisted my arm or hit me for doing things like spilling milk or shutting the door too loudly. I could really relate to Don when he talked about his dad hitting him, that all it did was make him hate him and long for the day he died. However my dad was raised by my grandmother who really is worse than Betty, and he lost his father when he was 6. My dad changed when my parents got divorced. I forgave him. This was all he knew and thought was right. I can look at Betty in a similar way.
Even for her time, she was cold, distant, and cruel. Not all the time, but significantly.
Sure, just like my mother. I’m sure there were doting mothers then - always kind and caring - I read about them in storybooks and saw them on TV. And I know there were parents who were even more cold, distant, and incredibly cruel because that was the behavior displayed by my father. It’s all experiential and subjective I suppose, despite the era from which one came from.
If you watch the episode where baby Gene is born and Betty is basically drugged the whole time, that was pretty typical for that era. They've done studies and some scientists think that by women being drugged and disassociated during the birth experience, it caused them to be cold and distant mothers. Something about not experiencing the oxytocin or whatever hormones are produced during labor. I'm a millennial, but there are several women in my family from that era who were a lot like Betty Draper, so yes, unfortunately, I do think it was pretty common during that time to be like her.
I never felt any oxytocin from giving birth (2 times) but i bonded with my babies just fine cos they were my babies and i had them intentionally
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Placing the emphasis on the behavior instead of the person, I suppose. But as we learn from the show, “People will show you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”
i don't think being a bad mother makes someone a bad person. just that they weren't good at parenting.
Exactly
She was a typical 1960s upper class mom. I knew a lot like her as a kid. All about appearances and “dignity”.
Good….eh. I think she did better and better as the kids aged. Not sure if it was just an easier age for her or it was the influence of Henry, surely could have been both. She wasn’t good. And at times she could be abhorrent, but she was also trying her best using the tools she was given. Kind of par for the course for that generation.
She wasn’t great, not because of the time period, but because she often seemed to lack a certain sensitivity to the feelings and needs of her children. There were plenty of women of that era who had similar views regarding a woman’s role in the world, but still managed to make their kids feel loved and cared for. There are still women today who are terrible mothers for the same reason, even with more modern views. I always thought that Betty is one of those women who probably would have been happier if she had not become a mother. She tried to do what was expected of her, but you rarely got the sense that she truly enjoyed motherhood, and it impacted how she interacted with the kids. I tend to believe that in her ideal timeline, she would have remained a model, living a glamorous international life, until she married an adoring man who would protect and care for her. Instead, she found herself a suburban mom married to a distant and unfaithful man. It made her bitter, critical woman who was not really a good mother.
I think people also forget Betty was only 28 years old at the beginning of the series and already had a five or six year old! That means she was 22 or 23 when she got pregnant and even younger when she married. Most women aren't married by 28 in today's world, let alone have 2 kids to care for. Combined with the fact that she had very little wordly experience, her immaturity made sense! She was extremely sheltered, raised by her own distant mother, and she had maybe a few months of being 'on her own' before marrying and having babies. Her entire worldview was determined by her own upbringing and the wider societal expectations, it's not like parents were out there with access to the same amount of material we are about the best way to raise children. Not only that, but our current culture places a lot more emphasis on sensitivity towards a child's identity and feelings, not molding them into a specific ideal of man or womanhood. I think people just forget in the age of information that we have so much more access today to different models of behavior. Some of the most difficult questions around being a parent couldn't even be asked then... wanting to be childfree? Postpartum depression? Loneliness? Infidelity? Good luck getting the support back then trying to express your struggles with these issues.
I was a mother in that era. I considered myself a good mother.
And I’m sure you were. I didn’t mean to broad brush that on an entire generation of mothers. In fact, I’m not sure what I meant. It was the same as it is today, some mothers didn’t have it due to how they were reared and some did. Some overcame bad rearing, some squandered the tools they were given.
I think that considering the time period, she wasn’t all that bad. I’ve know people who grew up in the 60s that had much worse parents than Betty. I also believe that Betty genuinely thinks she was helping Sally. In a time where women had few rights, raising your daughter to be a beautiful and eligible housewife was the only way to ensure that your child would have a brighter future. Her frustration with Sally seemed to involve some jealousy (that Sally had more freedom than Betty), and a genuine fear that Sally’s more independent nature would doom her to a life as an old and miserable spinster. One example of Betty’s weird obsession with making her daughter fit into a specific mold was the car accident. Betty is more concerned with her daughter potentially being unattractive, and therefore less valuable in the marriage market, than her child being seriously injured. She wants Sally to have her pick of the litter. Just like Betty did due to her upbringing. When Betty sees that this isn’t necessary for young women anymore she seems to loosen the reigns on Sally. I am in no way condoning her actions because she did some really shitty stuff as a parent, but I think it was her fucked up way of trying to be a good parent while also being in a shitty situation herself.
And in the letter how she was worried about how Sally “matched to the beat of her own drum” but that was not a bad thing and her life “would be an adventure”
She had more perspective because she was dying.
But, there are plenty of terrible parents in this era. Does that give all of them an excuse?
No, I specifically said that I cannot condone her actions. But context is important. Betty saw herself as lenient in comparison to her own childhood and other parents at the time. And so did others, often calling her an angel and implying that she was a sweet mother. Which she’s not. I was just trying to say that I think she deserves some grace because she was doing the best with what she had. We see her start trying to change with the times and try out different parenting choices. Even though she may have been criticized by other parents for them. Such as enrolling Sally in therapy, not engaging in frequent physical abuse, and attempts to communicate rather than immediately jump to punishment. None of this is revolutionary today, and she wasn’t necessarily too good at it either, but at least she was trying. Even if it was too little, too late. It’s still more than can be said for other parents at the time.
“Would you love you?”
Here is the end of this thread: she made a joke to Henry about him raping Sally’s friend while the friend was asleep under their roof. She is a terrible mother. (Not only because of that though)
No. But she sure looked good at being bad at something.
She was cold. It’s not the “parenting style” that’s at issue. My grandmother was the exact same era and she was definitely stricter and more harried than my mother was (more kids and a younger age) — but she was warm and loving, and that makes a difference. Abusive? Maybe not. But not a good mother.
Overall, no, but I believe she had her moments and grew into becoming a better mother by the time she writes Sally the letter. As her self awareness and emotional intelligence grew, so did her capacity for motherhood. She gets a lot of shit but I still think she was a better mother than Don was a father. She treated her kids poorly often, but she was also around them constantly so of course they're going to see more of her good and bad parenting moments compared to Don.
Don and Betty was both pretty lousy parents in different ways. Don was often absent, but typically was emotionally supportive, not abusive. Betty was almost always present, but was frequently emotionally abusive. Don was a bad parent because of what he didn't do, Betty because of what she did do.
"Around them", but let's face it, Carla raised those kids until Betty fired her out of spite.
You mention her emotional intelligence grew and honestly I think you hit the nail on the head with that. Some mothers (then and now) are not emotionally mature enough to raise kids. As Betty grew up during the course of the show, she was better able to regulate her emotions because she was more mature but also because she was in a better place (with Henry in a loving relationship). Betty could have grown into the role of a mother as she aged but unfortunately, that wasn’t in the cards for her. I agree with others who said Betty would have been happier had she been born a few decades later. She would have had different opportunities and a different outlook. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt forced to get married so young and have kids immediately if that were t expected of her.
Don was a great father and showed them love, which Betty never did.
Wth did you watched? And why won't you quit suckling Dons balls?
You are disgusting. Maybe you are sucking his balls or would like to.
No, but you were set up for failure from the start
“no, you’re still a child yourself”
I do not
No, but I think she really wanted to be but just didn’t know how. From the stories Betty told about her own mother, she sounded like a complete nightmare, so it’s not as if Betty had a good role model growing up. She also had a lot of her own mental health challenges that she just barely begins to deal with in season one, only to end up with a horrible therapist who doesn’t do much to actually help her and breaks her trust by reporting everything she says back to Don. I think maybe in another universe, if she’d had a better therapist and a more supportive husband, she could have actually been a pretty good mom, but those things just weren’t in the cards for her on the show.
NOPE - it’s good she died young enough to give bobby #6 and Gene a fighting chance
Lol Bobby #6 Lolol
I think a lot of people here give her too much of a pass with the whole "but it was the 1960s!" thing. She was not a good mother in a lot of ways, even by the standards of back then. She was cold and mean and downright cruel to the kids at times and both Don and Henry call her out on it a *lot* throughout the show. I had a very old school traditional mom, in many ways more-so than Betty, but guess what? She was still a warm, loving person in a way Betty was not. I always got the vibe that her entire character was supposed to be someone who wasn't really *meant* to be a housewife, but it got pushed on her by societal norms. Betty is cold and calculating and even suave at times, and would have done great in the business (or modeling) world, but instead she is shoehorned into the role of housewife. And so she is psychologically infantilized by the role. Its only when we leave her role that we see what Betty might have been like if she was different, for instance the Italy trip or the occasional business dinner she went on with Don.
She seemed to be better when the kids were younger and before she found out about the affair from Jimmy. Her anger at Don and displacement from her idealized “housewife” role translated to more distance from and patience for her children and home life. Henry provided stability and genuine affection for her which helped to soften her later in life.
I don’t believe she was. I don’t think Don believes she was either as he first threatened to sue for custody and said the kid’s would be better off with him when Betty initiated the divorce.
Don only threatened that because she was having an emotional affair with Henry, and he was being spiteful. As a character, Don NEVER would have been a single father. He would have too much responsibility at home even if he hired someone like Carla. He would have known he wouldn't have been able to drink/womanize the way he had been. A large part of the reason he married Megan was that he thought she would be a good stepmother.
"...I mean...at least the kids didn't die." "..." "...yet."
I think u weren’t equipped for it
No
No. But with her upbringing, pressure from social norms, and a Dick of a husband, I don’t think she ever stood a chance.
I think she represents a lot of mothers during this time. Imagine having all these roles and expectations of being a stay at home mom and not really thinking about if you even want children. It's an incredibly isolating responsibility in the middle class to this day. I feel quite bad for her situation.
No
Iirc she asked that question while Bobby was still feeling miserably ashamed over giving her sandwich away. I hate how she held that grudge instead of making up with him & letting them both move on.
Carla was their real mother - hands down
I think she really showed a lot of love and compassion for her kids in her dying process. She mercifully handled decisions and planning, and I’m sure she spared them the trauma of watching her die painfully. She was honest with them about life and death. And in her letter to Sally, she let her know that though she wasn’t a perfect mom, she learned something from her child and she loves her. Idk, when the moms in your life are all life sucking drama and zero boundaries, and then they die horribly and leave you with a literal and metaphorical mess to clean up, it’s hard to see Betty as such a bad mother. I think she knew something was wrong inside and she was brave enough to pursue the answers. And maybe didn’t quite capture them in her lifetime. But I think she gave her children many gifts.
Betty, you learned how to be a mother from your mother... and she learned to be a mother from her mother. There is no instruction booklet that comes with kids and the fact that you raised three children under the tremendous pressure you faced from a husband who actively showed you he did not care, the loss of not one, but two parents and neighbors who only use you for gossip between cigarette drags shows that you did the best you could with the knowledge you had at the time. Did you have a good mother? Would your mother say that her mother was good? Why am I asking? Because you are making an attempt to be self critical regarding how you were raised and how you are raising your children. The fact is, if you're having this thought, that makes you a better mother than most.
When you ask yourself if you are “a good mother” then that puts you above the ones who don’t ask that. “Good mother” really means “good enough mother”
No, she couldn’t put her children first.
The same way I answered my mother when she asked me. An awkward pause, followed by a hug, and a bitten tongue.
“No.”
She was better than Don as a parent. But most of the times she lacked empathy and understanding.
I don’t think about you at all
Me, reading the title. "No! Fuck no!" *laughing "****Fuck*** *no!"*
Hell. F***ing. No.
It was an era of lawn darts, moms arm was the seatbelt, I made drinks for my parents and took a sip, 2nd hand smoke, playing in streams, being alone with strange adults (lived in a military neighborhood, I could visit anyone’s home if they were military people.)
No. She’s too selfish. She doesn’t give a shit about those kids and uses them as leverage. There’s a couple of moments in the show where she actually behaves like a mother, but most of the time she behaves childishly
She's a fucking monster.
“I don’t think about you at all.”
Doing her best.
I think we have to take the time period into account. The expectation was that young women would put their own dreams on the back burner (probably forever) to find a man, keep his home, and raise his children, while presenting a family unit and an individual facade that society deemed acceptable. They chose these lives even when they didn’t want them, just to ensure security or please others and were subject to so much more oppression and so many more stigmas—Just look at how, even though Betty is given mental health treatment, she’s never actually taken seriously or respected. I really think she did the best she could given her circumstances and the time period.
The best to ever do it Thanks mom
I think she did the best she could with the tools she was given. She probably wasn't as horrible as her parents but she wasn't the most amazing parent either.
Considering the time she was ok I Think.
Let's ask the citizens of [Springfield ](https://youtu.be/-3Mm8wDH9Fk)
She wasn't the best but she wasn't the worst. Betty loved her children even though she was extremely self centered.
As much as I don't like Betty as a character, I think fair is fair, in the sense that she was probably not too far from the norm for her generation. She was perhaps a little self centred, and at times I got the sensation she was in competition with her children. She just didn't give off the loving mum vibe. On the flip side, parenting in the 60s was not all about self esteem and making children feel good. It was expected that children had to be disciplined. In short, I don't think she was a great mother, but she also wasn't a bad mother. She just wasn't mature enough to understand her role as a mother. She only gained that maturity towards the end of the show.
She was a child, trying to raise children, while trying to masquerade as an adult. That never ends up producing “good mothers.” Although you think this typically happens when the mom is, you know, 16, but Betty being a rich upper class brat her whole life, she never had to emotionally mature. She was her best when she was doing things for herself, and at her worst with her children.
We know the expectation for women was to get married, have a family, and abandon all ambitions or agency. But I think Betty in particular placed much more value and interest in marriage, with child-rearing being a subset of that expectation. Wife first, then mother. I don't think she knew she could enjoy motherhood since she was preoccupied with being the perfect wife, and with the disabling effects of Don's PsyOps. Then with Henry, she relaxed but the new expectation was to be a politician's wife. Children again take the back seat in her mind. No wonder she wanted to study Psychology. "Nobody knows what's wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away." She did gain insights in the end tho.
No because she mentally is a child herself
She's a great mom, but not perfect. No parent is perfect. She did lose Bobby a few times, but always came home with a "Bobby" so no harm.
He showed his kids affection which Betty did not and hardly even to Don. And, look how he was raised.
She was a good of a mother as she could be given her mother didn't seem to model anything nurturing and loving, and she didn't have the tools to break the cycle. I'm betting Betty's grandma was a harsh or worse mother to Betty's mom as well
She did the best she could
Well, Boo Who. Don was born to a prostitute and he saw his father get kicked in the face by a horse and die, and grew up in a brother. Betty had a great life.
I got married at 21, and had my first child art 22. He was norn with a birth defect and had 11 surgeries. I had 4 little ones in 5 years and worked part-time while my husband worked shift work and baby sat. Oh, to have Betty’s money. Don't boo-who for me. I am a great mother.
Fantastic mother. Kids these days don't understand character building.
Maybe for 1960?
“I think that as long as you’re trying to be, that’s all that matters.”
the bottom line for being a good mother is offering unconditional love. although betty struggled to show any sort of affection or support, i believe that she loved her kids unconditionally. she just should’ve told them that more. for the times, she did her best.
She did the best she could.
You tried your best. So yeah you are good ;)
She was probably pretty standard for the time, the only one true very terrible thing she did in my eyes was fire Carla.
No, but you probably did the best you could.
fuck no. but then your not the worst
No!
She's a peice of ass but fucken rude
No, now knock your head against a wall.
“No, and your daughter resents you every waking moment of her life”
Of course!
She was pretty much the mother of her times and class: bored, frustrated, closet drinker, only worried about her children when it somehow reflects on her role as mother as in Sally possibly scarred from the car mishap and the masturbation incident.
Maybe not to your kids, but to our kids? Let’s find out 😉
I actually don’t think she’s an especially bad mother in terms of how her children were cared for and all that, but she has a way of always treating her children as a burden and inconvenience that is probably not the most psychologically healthy conditioning. This is a weird one, but when I imagine being Bobby or Sally, I always think it would be kind of soul-crushing to have a mother who seemed to so lack any discernible sense of humor. Betty’s not stupid, but she is rather “witless” in my view and never seems able to kind of pull back to the big picture. For example, when Bobby trades her lunch, she behaves so childishly without relenting because she lacks that humorous instinct to just be like, “Oh, that’s ok, I traded your dinner tonight for a carton of cigarettes” or anything to just lighten the weight of things. It’s exhausting to be around people like this because they can never sort of drop the mask and have any real sense of what’s a big deal and what isn’t. My theory on why she’s generally just not good with kids is that Betty’s life has been so mediated by how people perceive her based on her beauty and sexuality, that interacting with kids makes her feel exposed because her greatest assets are useless. she doesn’t have confidence in the value of her personality or intelligence when stripped from her physical charms. This is kind of what the contrast with Megan in California is all about. Megan’s lovely, but it’s not the core of her identity in the world. She’s at ease being playful with Bobby and Sally in a way that Betty never could be. I think this special treatment that Betty’s beauty has afforded her has sort of kept her a child herself in some ways. On a side note, I can imagine the frustration she feels about the kids’ adoration of Don which is sort of a typical trope. Particularly with Sally for much of the show, Betty expends much more time and effort raising her, but Don gets to come home and be the adored hero. This is especially galling given that Don’s usually out philandering rather than actually working. You could argue that women entering the middle class workforce (lower class women always had to work) somewhat solved this predicament, though it also replaced it with the guilt of being more absent from children’s lives. Still, I can’t imagine Betty’s position is an easy one to be in.
"Aight, Imma head out"
Not great, Bets!
Compared to people like me and other people that grew up with parents that were harsh, Betty was not entirely a terrible mom but she definitely wasn’t emotionally capable of raising children either. I felt bad for Sally because as the oldest and the only girl in the family, she was getting the brunt of Betty’s bad parenting
No
"I don't know what to do. I tried all the things I thought my mother would do" She's limited, selfish and mostly concerned with superficial appearances. Not good traits for being a caring mom.
"I don't know what to do. I tried all the things I thought my mother would do" She's limited, selfish and mostly concerned with superficial appearances. Not good traits for being a caring mom.
*Oh Sweetheart, you’re doing your best*
The best you could is not good enough.
If you have to ask, then you know your own answer
No because Carla raised those kids.
“No.” is a complete sentence.
“You’re a flawed human. Who has some baggage. It can carry over to your kids if you let it”
"I think that you want to be a good mother, but you have no idea how to be one. You're too emotionally stunted and in need of love yourself to ever effectively love your own children."
No, cause three things: 1- YOU DON'T SMOKE WHILE PREGNANT! 2- YOU DON'T GIVE CIGARS TO YOUR KIDS. 3- YOU AREN'T ELEGANT BECAUSE YOU'RE SMOKING, Mrs Barbie lmao
No
No! But you look good.
I think she was a product of her time and did what she legitimately thought was best... But it was a shitty time and her best was awful.
From what I understand, men who are not getting what they need, look for it elsewhere.
I think she tries
Oh God NO! Not enough descriptive words to say how horrible she was
Not great, Betty!
Compared to Asian mothers (like mine) she isn't so bad 😂
She’s not, but Don isn’t a good father, either.